Autumn 2001

497/8 AMW 9:30-11:20Mussetter(W)Beowulf. In this course we will be reading the Old English
Beowulf in as wide a context as we can retrieve. We will be
reading it in translation, of course. But not only will we be comparing
translations on occasions, we’ll be doing just a bit of the original Old
English as well. We’ll be looking at some of the supposed ancestors
and cousins of the poem, at early medieval attitudes toward monsters, at
the social/political environment that the poet presumably lived in, at the
manuscript in which Beowulf is contained. This course is a seminar,
so that presumes a certain amount of participation—discussion and report-making,
or whatever we decide is worth doing. There will be some written work
to do, too, of course. But the number of papers and their length are
open for negotiation. So. If you’re interested in old timey
heroes, monster lore, unpronounceable names, and hard history, you should
have a good time. An interest in the glorious miseries, miserable glories
of the human condition will be a great help. Text: Heaney, tr.,
Beowulf: A New Verse Translation.

497/8 BMW 10:30-12:20Prebel(W)City Folks: Urbanization and Identity. What happens to American culture
and identity when the majority of the population migrates to the city?
This is the primary question we'll explore in this class, as we look at literary,
sociological, and political narratives of urbanization during the peak time
of urban migration: 1880-1930. I'm interested in examining the various
ways the "city" impacts not only the geographical landscape but also notions
of American personhood in this era. Requirements: Active, intelligent
class participation; a class presentation; response papers; 15 page seminar
paper. Texts: Frank Norris, McTeague; William Dean Howells,
A Modern Instance; Henry James, The Bostonians; Anzia Yezierska,
Salome of the Tenaments; Claude McKay, Home to Harlem; Edith
Wharton, House of Mirth.

497/8 CTTh 9:30-11:20Lydia Fisher(W)American Civility. In the American literary tradition, the
“land of the free, home of the brave” often figures as an untamed wilderness—the
untainted territory of “natural man.” And, alternately, American writers
have imagined their nation as a model society of republican virtue, peopled
by democratically cultured citizens. Through our readings of course
texts we will examine writers’ responses to social movements and historical
conditions that have contributed to changing conceptions of the “nature” and
culture of the American people. We will investigate early Americans’
fascination with imagery of vast untamed lands full of rustic pioneers and
Indians, and then ask how later writers’ responses to such institutions and
conditions as American slavery, immigration, class unrest, gender inequality,
and racial tensions revisit and revise powerful ideologies that produced Americans
and American national identity. This is a discussion course—your
active participation is key. Texts: Zitkala-Sa, ed., American Indian
Stories; Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Ellison, Invisible Man;
James, Daisy Miller; Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes; Gilman,
Herland; Crane, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets.

497/8 DTTh 10:30-12:20Solberg(W)Race and America. Here we explore race as a central fact of
American life and its literary expression. Readings range from the
19th-century Huckleberry Finn to the contemporary Meena Alexander. We will
look at the controversies surrounding Twain’s classic, race and the color
line as seen by DuBois at the beginning of the last century, and briefly how
those problems have played out down to the present. You will be encouraged
to bring your own experience of life to bear on the topic as we trace the
often tenuous-seeming links between “literature” and “life.” Two
papers and one class presentation. Texts:Mark Twain, Huckleberry
Finn; W.E.B. DuBois, Writings: The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade,
The Souls of Black Folk, Dusk of Dawn, Essays, Articles from the Crisis;
Nella Larsen, Quicksand and Passing; Carlos Bulosan, America
is in the Heart; Meena Alexander, The Shock of Arrival: Reflections
on Postcolonial Experience; Manhattan Music.

497/8 ETTh 12:30-2:20Kaup(W)Madness in Women’s Writing. Constructions of madness as “the female
malady” (Elaine Showalter) in 19th and 20th-century women’s writing. Women’s
continuing interest in insanity and mental illness derives from their insight
into cultural associations of femininity with irrationality in Western thought.
The course traces the shift of the figure of the madwoman from the margins
to the center of women’s narratives: from the 19th-century formation of “the
madwoman in the attic” (Gilbert/Gubar) the duality of the sane Victorian heroine
and her “mad double” (Jane Eyre) through modernism (Mrs. Dalloway)
to “mad heroines” in confessional and experiential narratives of the 60s
and beyond (Plath, Rhys, Morrison) and to new developments towards “visionary
madness” and the reinterpretation of madness as “spiritual quest” (not
breakdown, but renewal) (Atwood, Head). Texts: Charlotte Brontë, Jane
Eyre; Charlotte Perkins Gillman, “The Yellow Wallpaper”; Virginia
Woolf, Mrs Dalloway; Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar; Jean Rhys, Wide
Sargasso Sea; Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye; Margaret Atwood,
Surfacing; Bessie Head, A Question of Power.

497/8 FTTh 1:30-3:20Allen(W)Loving/Hating/Reading/Fiction. This is a seminar in the weird
pleasures, wild emotions, and secret seductions of reading fiction.
How, exactly, to we “take in” fiction? How much control does the author
have over how the reader feels while reading? Do we read differently
when we’re reading across gender or sexuality or ethnicity? Why do
some readers choose puzzle novels while others prefer love stories?
Can we love novels if they are about things we hate? How do films “read”
stories differently from books? Do we identify with characters who seem
in many ways to be our opposites? We’ll read modern and contemporary
fictions to try to get some tentative answers to these questions. Discussion
will be at the heart of what we do, so come expecting lots of talk and lively
differences of opinion. Texts: Bernard Schlink, The Reader;
Italo Calvino, If On a Winter's Night a Traveler; Virginia Woolf, Mrs.
Dalloway; Michael Cunningham, The Hours; Toni Morrison, Playing
in the Dark; Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body.

497/8 GTTh 8:30-10:20Reddy(W)1898: Sexuality, Race, Nation and Novelty. This seminar will
examine shifts in the concept, purposes, and form of the U.S. “novel” at the
turn of the twentieth century. We will be concerned to establish both
the coherence and permeability of three enduring modern notions— “sex,” “race,”
and “nation”— by which novels are written, organized and read within a historical
context that includes the invention of the “ modern homosexual,” the ascendance
of U.S. imperialism, mass migrations and industrial urbanization. Training
our focus on the effects of these “contexts” on the novel genre in and around
1898 the course will endeavor finally to help students of literature think
through the connections between literary periodization, aesthetics, and politics.
Primary texts will include a selection of U.S. novels (and some from the
Philippines and the circum-Caribbean) from the sub-genres of realism, naturalism,
and modernism. Secondary readings will be culled from Theory of
the Novel: A Historical Approach (ed.) Michael McKeon and Marxism
and Literature by Raymond Williams.

497/8 YATTh 7-8:50 pmAlan Fisher(W)Shakespeare: Some Major Tragedies. Close reading and discussion
of four of Shakespeare’s major tragedies: Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear,
Antony and Cleopatra. Members of the class will be asked to write
a one-page “response” paper for each class, and a term paper (minimum 15,
maximum 20 pages) either on another Shakespearean tragedy (with some attention
to the history of staging or of critical opinion) or on “tragedy” in
general (based either on two or more plays of Shakespeare, at least one not
discussed
in class, or on a comparison between a play of Shakespeare and a Greek or
modern tragedy). Evening Degree students only, Registration Period
1. Texts: Shakespeare, Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Antony
and Cleopatra.

Winter 2002

497/8AMW 9:30-11:20C. FischerJames Joyce.This quarter we will examine the works
of James Joyce leading up to and including Ulysses. Our course
work will center around a close reading of the major texts, but we also will
consider the historical, social, and political context of his time. In
addition to the primary reading, we will address related topics of importance:
the question of high literary Modernism verse the modernisms of alterity,
the realist novel versus the avant-garde text, Joyce's politics with regard
to Home Rule, and various critica. approaches to reading literature.

497/8BMW 10:30-12:20PrebelWayward Girls, Wandering Women. This class will explore
the literary trope of the "fallen woman" across various historical and cultural
registers, from her appearance in the first American novel to the American
modernist representation of the "wandering" woman. We'll look at sociological,
political, and medical discourse about the "woman problem" in order to consider
what cultural anxiety is attendant upon female sexual, geographical, and socioeconomic
mobility. This course includes a rigorous reading list and requires
daily active participation, along with a seminar paper and response papers.
Texts: Stephen Crane, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets; Hannah
Foster, The Coquette; Pauline Hopkins, Contending Forces; Edith
Wharton, The House of Mirth; Henry James, Daisy Miller; Gertrude
Stein, Three Lives.

497/8CMW 11:30-1:20VaughanIrish Culture and the Plays of Brian Friel. Brian Friel
may be the most prominent Irish playwright of the end of the twentieth century.
This seminar will read and discuss his plays as they examine and represent
some of the major themes of Irish culture: language, exile, history, politics,. Students
will present weekly short papers, an oral report, and a term paper. Texts: Friel, Selected Plays; Plays 2; Essays, Diaries, Interviews,
1966-1998; Jones, Brian Friel; Maxwell, Brian Friel.

497/8DMW 12:30-2:20TandyThe Sublime Experience: Subject and Perceiver. The sublime
is an important touchstone concept for understanding changes in emotional
and artistic sensibility which were taking place at the end of the eighteenth
century in England, and for providing context for the reactions in the century
that followed. In this course, we will begin with a philosophical examination
of the sublime in the works of Kant and Burke, but we will quickly move on
to artistic representations of the sublime in visual art, poetry and prose.
As we move through the nineteenth century, our central questions will be,
what place does the sublime have in conventional, respectable Victorian society?
And what happens when the sublime, usually manifested by scenes of nature,
is instead manifested in a human being? Through this examination of
the sublime, we will address such issues as gender difference, religion, and
social relations in a developing industrial/capitalist society.
Texts: Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus; Emily Brontë, Wuthering
Heights; Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall; Joseph
Conrad, Heart of Darkness; Mary Shelley, Frankenstein.

497/8EMW 1:30-3:20HennesseeMale Masochism in Victorian Literature and Culture. Students
of Victorian literature and culture have come to know the conventional gender
norms of the period. In The Subjection of Women John Stuart Mill cogently
describes them in a discussion of Victorian educational practices. Mill critiques
a system of education in which women "are universally taught that they are
born and created for self-sacrifice," producing "an exaggerated self-abnegation."
Men, by contrast, are taught "to worship their own will as such a grand thing,"
learning "self-worship." Mill searches for the self-assertion achieved by
feminine self-abnegating postures. For example, he suggests that through "moral
influence" women can become "potent auxiliaries to virtue" that greatly account
for "two of the most marked features of modern European life -- its aversion
to war, and its addiction to philanthropy." Like Mill, modern feminist scholars
have sought to understand Victorian women as more than self-abnegating victims
of patriarchal oppression. In recent scholarship Victorian women often appear
as social actors who manipulate the structures of patriarchy in ways that
offer possibilities of agency and empowerment. Less focus has been given
to the other side of Mill's story -- the self-abnegation that may inhere
in grandly self-willed Victorian masculinity. If Victorian women used postures
of self-sacrifice – even extending to masochism -- to hide their proscribed
self-assertion, did Victorian men, conversely, conceal within their assertive
postures self-sacrifice, self-abnegation, and a masochism of their own? This
seminar will explore this question with reference to a range of Victorian
cultural materials: political tracts, poetry, novels, pornography, letters.
We'll begin with Thomas Carlyle's concept of "Hero-worship" as solution to
the "Condition of England" question. Then we'll read Tennyson's monumental,
pain-driven poem In Memoriam as response to the Victorian "Crisis
of Faith." We'll turn next to two novels -- Dickens' Great Expectations
and Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs -- both of which theorize male
masochism as it develops in relation to idealized femininity, mid-Victorian
gender norms, and codes of gentility. Swinburne's poetry will provide occasion
for close textual reading as well as entry into the often brutalizing world
of the all-male English public school. We'll conclude with Wilde's letter
De Profundis, written from prison to his lover Bosie. These primary
texts will be supplemented by additional critical, historical, and theoretical
readings, some lecture, and possible in-class screenings of film adaptations.
Course requirements are active participation in discussions, a class
presentation (with follow-up 5-6 pp. essay), and a longer (8-10 pp.) final
essay. Texts: Carlyle, Past and Present; Tennyson, In Memoriam;
Dickens, Great Expectations; Wilde, The Portable Oscar Wilde;
Deleuze, Masochism.

497/8FTTh 8:30-10:20TaranathDomesticity, Sexual Purity, and Other Gendered Concerns in Late 19th-Century
International Discourse. This quarter we will be reading a wide
variety of primary and secondary texts concerned with who the “modern” woman
is, how she is cultivated, how she should act, and of course, how she should
NOT act. In particular, late-19th-century emerging distinctions between
“properly domestic” and “morally licentious” women will be explored.
While our readings will emerge from such distinct geographical sites as Puerto
Rico, China, India, Britain, Russia, and Kenya, we will begin to see how colonialism,
imperialism, modernity, and other globalizing forces during the nineteenth
century created surprising relationships between men and women of ostensibly
“different” backgrounds. This is a reading-intensive and discussion-oriented
class.

497/8GTTh 9:30-11:20BarnettAmerican Ethnic Fiction and Rememory. This seminar is
a comparative study of recent American ethnic fiction and rememory—a term
coined by Toni Morrison to describe the method of constructing identity and
accessing agency by confronting and reclaiming painful experiences from the
past in order to locate one’s place in regards to family, community, group,
and nation. In addition to novels, expect a rigorous reading schedule,
including critical essays and historical texts. Texts: Toni
Morrison, Beloved; Ana Castillo, So Far From God; Paule Marshall,
Praisesong for the Widow; Linda Hogan, Mean Spirit; Julia
Alvarez, In the Time of the Butterflies; Fae Myenne Ng, Bone;
Jhumpa Lahiri, ed., Interpreter of Maladies.

"The way we read now, when we are alone with ourselves, retains
considerable continuity with the past, however it is performed in the academis.
. . . To read human sentiments in human language, you must be able to read
humanly, with all of you." --Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why

In this class, you will investigate what Harold Bloom means by “all of
you,” academically as well as non-academically, professionally as well as
personally. Throughout your research, you will decide whether you agree with
him and whether you believe that the “you” of our time is in fact different
from the “you” of past times--before the digital revolution.
Ours is a class that will explore ways of reading as well as the pleasures
and pains of the reading experience—intellectual, imaginative, and sensual.
Why? Because some assume that the act of reading refers to eyes scanning
hard copy print, with little regard to the larger realm of the senses and
aspects of the self. Others believe that the notion of isolated reading is
erroneous, too narrow a reading regimen that eliminates community, restricts
the imagination, and ignores altogether readers’ multi-sensory perceptions
and potential pleasures of textual engagement. In our course,
we will analyze these academic and popular notions of reading, as well as
Bloom’s and other scholars' theories of reading. We will them against our
readings, in and outside of the academic classroom. Course texts include
conventionally bound books, audio and videotapes, and hyperlinked literature.
Course methods include summarizing and investigating our findings. We will
conduct many of our discussions and much of our research not just alone and
in print, but face to face and online. Course requirements include
an interest in reading and theorizing about reading practices, exploring
your own and others’ reading practices and preferences; writing about reading;
questioning theories of reading (your own as well as others’, past
and present); reflecting upon your reading habits and prejudices; and diving
deeply
into
the Internet, with the goal of mining it for factual gain rather than surfing
it for commercial loss. Please note: Although a good deal of
our class time will be spent online, this is not a distance-learning course:
you need to be able to attend class regularly in the English Department’s
computer-integrated classrooms in Mary Gates Hall, where much of the human
as well as computer interaction of our studies will take place. Texts: Sven
Birkirts, The Gutenberg Elegies; Italo Calvino, If on
a Winter's Night a Traveler; Sven Birkirts, ed., Tolstoy's Dictaphone
: Technology and the Muse; course packet of critical and theoretical
articles, and other creative writings.

497/8YAMW 7-8:50 pmAbramsNineteenth-Century American Literature: Alternative Images of the Nation.
We’ll begin by studying efforts to create mainstream, middle-class models
of nineteenth-century American life: safely stereotypic visions of national
culture and experience promoted through popular "fireside poetry," Currier
and Ives engravings, and other art forms. Then we’ll explore, in dramatic
contrast, a series of literary texts in which the meaning of America is hazarded
into an agitated interplay of perspectives, in which voices excluded from
the official cultural mainstream are attended to, and in which otherwise neglected
aspects of the historical moment are granted visibility. We’ll be studying
the battle between stereotype and underlying social complexity, between the
official cultural mainstream and what it would exile to its margins, as
this battle is fought in novels and biographies, poems and tales. Readings
in Douglass, Fuller, Whittier, Whitman, Thoreau, Melville, Hawthorne, Rebecca
Harding Davis, Chopin, and Crane.

Spring 2002

497/8ATTh 12:30-2:20Simpson"Other" Representations of World War II. The lore and legacy
that constitute the national memory of World War II is so familiar that it
hardly needs mention. Even as Americans approach the 21st century and
a "war against terror," the events and crises of World War II remain important
to cohering and validating the current declared mission of the US. In
this course we will explore the making of the legacy of World War II from
an often-neglected location, that of ethnic or racialized Others living in
the US, whether national or heroic subjects or not. We will read or
view a wide range of primary works from and about the period of World War
II, as well as turning our attention to the contemporary recycling of World
War II in the wake of the events of September 11. The materials we will
cover will include novels, short stories, jourrnalistic accounts, films and
histories. (The textbooks listed below will be supplemented with a course
readings packet.) What we hope is to gain a better understanding of
the myriad ways in which that war has been recorded, remembered, and re-imagined.
Students taking this seminar should be aware that it is structured as an interdisciplinary,
team-taught course. Our class will meet with a senior-level history
class enrolled with Professor Susan Glenn from the History department. Professor
Glenn and I welcome, in particular, those students interested in thinking and
writing across disciplinary lines. Texts: Plenberg, War and Society; Okubo, Citizen 13660; Himes, If
He Hollers, Let Him Go; Spiegelman, Maus, Vol. 1; Hersey, Hiroshima;
Mailer, The Naked and the Dead; photocopied course packet.

497/8BMW 10:30-12:20McRaeLiterature and Myth. In this course, students will study transmissions
and transformations of myth through literature. Using various critical approaches
as tools, we will explore literary uses of myth by tracing the transmission
of particular myths from "original" sources to a later adaptation, and examine
how the meaning of a myth can shift according to the context in which it occurs.
During the first three weeks of the quarter students will become familiar
with various critical and methodological approaches used in the literary
analysis of myth, begin to plan their individual projects, and develop course
proposals. Students are free to choose their primary text from any literary
period that interests them, and their mythic sources from any culture. Subsequent
weeks will be devoted to class presentations and discussions of each project,
and pursuit of research. Students should be interested in the intersections
of literature and myth, familiar with the mythology of at least one culture
and have some familiarity with literary or anthropological critical theory.
Each student will pursue his or her own research project during the quarter,
and turn in a 20-page paper at the end of the quarter. Grades are based upon
successful completion of individual research projects.
Text: photocopied course packet.

497/8CMW 12:30-2:20SolbergColonial and Post Colonial Writers and Writing from the Archipelago and
the Continent. This course will look at Philippine writing under colonialism
(Spain, United States) and after with side trips to the cosmopolitan center
with Philippine-American writers. Texts: Jose Rizal, Noli
me tangere; N. V. M. Gonzalez, A Season of Grace; Work on
the Mountain; Carlos Bulosan, America is in the Heart; F. Sionil
Jose, Dusk; Jessica Haggedorn, Dogeaters; Peter Bacho, Cebu.

497/8DMW 1:30-3:20TaranathClassrooms, Lunchrooms, and Playgrounds -- Contemporary Discussions on
American Education and Race. This interdisciplinary seminar
will bring together a wide variety of texts in order to further our understanding
about two interrelated processes: the racial dimensions of contemporary education,
and how we as contemporary subjects are educated into a racial logic. Our
discussion-oriented seminar will focus on both social history and literature. Texts: Ann Arnett Ferguson, Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making
of Black Masculinity; Cameron & McCarthy, eds., Race, Identity
and Representation in Education; Theresa Perry, ed., The Real Ebonics
Debate: Power, Language, and the Education of African American Children;
Beverly Daniel Tatem, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together
in the Cafeteria? and Other Conversations about Race; Shawn Wong, American
Knees; Gillian & Gillian, Growing Up Ethnic in America: Contemporary
Fiction about Learning to be American.

497/8ETTh 9:30-11:20ModianoContracts of the Heart: Sacrifice, Gift Economy and Literary Exchange
in Coleridge and Wordsworth. In this seminar we will study the
literary relationship of Coleridge and Wordsworth who, as one critic remarked, “not only pervasively influenced one another, but did so in a way that challenges
ordinary methods of assessments.” We will explore the possibility
of deriving from theories of gift exchange and sacrifice a new model of literary
influence that would shed light on this remarkably intimate and deeply conflicted
relationship.

We will spend the first four weeks of the quarter studying theories of gift
exchange and sacrifice as proposed, among others, by Marcel Mauss, Marshall
Sahlins, Georg Simmel, Lewis Hyde and Pierre Bourdieu (on the gift); and
by Sigmund Freud, Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, René Girard and Georges
Bataille (on sacrifice). The next six weeks will be devoted to the
study of major poems by Coleridge and Wordsworth in chronological order,
showing how the two poets, while desiring to imitate each other, find themselves
competing for the same themes and appropriating each other’s subjects.
Thus, while early Coleridge wrote successful nature poetry and Wordsworth
portrayed moving stories of human suffering in a supernatural setting, after
their collaboration on the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth turned to the philosophy
of the mind’s relationship with nature, while Coleridge started to explore
the effects of supernaturalism on the psyche.

Such moments of merging and separation can be profitably viewed through the
lens of gift exchange and sacrifice. The gift, for example, generates
a number of paradoxes that are relevant to the relationship between Coleridge
and Wordsworth, being at once an altruistic model of social interaction,
placing value on human bonds above economic or private interests, while at
the same time remaining embedded in a self-interested power structure.
Gift exchange often secures the privileged position of the donor at the expense
of receivers and yet, as Mauss showed, receivers seem to retain “a sort of
proprietary right” over everything that belongs to the donor. The gift
thus generates the obfuscation of ownership rights and an erasure of the
differences between donors and beneficiaries. We will see how Wordsworth
and Coleridge, while collaborating early on a single unauthored volume (Lyrical
Ballads) and wanting to write the same poem (“The Wanderings of Cain,” “The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner”), found themselves increasingly asserting “proprietary
rights” over the stock of inventions which they initially passed on to each
other according to the law of the gift. Wordsworth continued to use
Coleridge’s ideas but tried hard to displace Coleridge as a gift-giving source,
turning to nature or his private fund of “possessions,” to “Something within,
which yet is shared by none” (“Home at Grasmere”). Assignments:
A long paper (10-16 pp.), written in two stages and subject to revision;
bi-weekly comments on assigned readings; a final exam. Texts: Marcel
Mauss, The Gift; Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred; S. T.
Coleridge, Selected Poetry (ed. Beer); Biographia Literaria (ed.
Leask); Wordsworth, Selected Poetry (ed. Roe).

497/8FTTh 10:30-12:20PattersonPlantation Hollywood. This course will explore the representation
of slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction in film and literature. We
will start with the question why two of the most important American films – Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind – are about the war
between North and South, the conflict that Lincoln described as “a house divided.”
In order to answer this question, we will look at a series of 19th-century
literary texts written after the Civil War that attempted to heal the geographical,
social, and racial divisions that emerged in Reconstruction. These
texts will also create the context for the 20th-century films like Birth
of a Nation and Shirley Temple’s The Little Colonel that served
to rewrite slavery and the Civil War in ways that help us understand how
the South might have lost the Civil War but won the ideological battle of
Reconstruction. In addition to these films, we look at more recent films
like Glory, Sommersby, and the popular Ken Burns documentary on the
Civil War. Literary texts include Albion Tourgee, Fool’s Errand,
William de Forest, Miss Ravenal’s Conversion; Lydia Maria Child, Romance
of the Republic; Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes; Charles
Chestnutt, The Conjure Woman; Frances Harper, Iola Leroy.

497/8GTTh 12:30-2:20ReedElectronic Literature. We'll be looking at "classic" and recent
examples of fiction, poetry and other literary genres that are being written
specifically for reading/viewing/listening on a computer. We'll start
with a selection of late 80s/early 90s hypertext fictions--probably Michael
Joyce, "afternoon,
a story"; Stuart Moulthrop, "Victory Garden"; and Shelley
Jackson, "A Patchwork
Girl." We'll go on to look at samples of recent, exciting online
works by people such as Mark Amerika, Claire Dinsmore, Robert Kendal, Jennifer
Ley, and Jim Rosenberg. We'll be reading these assorted works in dialogue
with some essays on e-textuality by the likes of John Cayley, Donna Haraway,
and George Landow. Important note: No prior knowledge of computers
is required. This is strictly a literature class, not a programming
course. All that you need is a sense of adventure.

497/8HTTh 1:30-3:20KaplanBritish Writing in the 1920s. This seminar will explore British writing
during the 1920s. The class will read a variety of works from this
decade, ranging from its most famous (and difficult) poem, The Waste
Land, to one of its favorite examples of popular fiction, The Inimitable
Jeeves. We’ll read fiction by Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf,
and Aldous Huxley, as well as two notorious novels (both of them banned
by the censors): D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and
Radcliffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. In addition, each
student will be assigned a “lost” or neglected book written during this decade as the
focus for individual research and writing. Course requirements include
active participation in class discussion, library research assignments, oral
reports, short and longer papers, and a final examination.

497/8 IMW 10:30-12:20Dornbush(W)Added after Time Schedule printed. See on-line Time Schedule for
sln.Visions and Revisions. In this seminar we’ll explore modern
revisions of four classic texts of the Western canon – Shakespeare’s The
Tempest, Brontë’s Jane Eyre; Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,
and Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In addition to the
four works, we’ll read revisions produced by advocates for colonial and postcolonial
cultures in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and the cultures of the
African diaspora. Readings from postcolonial and feminist criticism
will also accompany our discussion of the social, political and interpretive
controversies these works have generated. Meets with C LIT 493/C LIT
496. Texts: Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place; Shakespeare,
The Tempest; Brontë, Jane Eyre; Rhys, Wide Sargasso
Sea; Conrad, Heart of Darkness; Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn.

497/8YAMW 7-8:50 pmBlakeSelf-Help and Inheritance. “Self-Help” is the title of a
best-selling book from 1859 by Samuel Smiles. It serves in the title
for a course exploring literature in English from the 19th-20th C.,
a period that has sharply promoted self-making through “self-help.”
But with this has also come a complication in thinking about inheritance.
Inheritance fills out the title and sets questions for the course about
the extent to which we are “made” by what has gone before, whether through
family, gender, race, class, national/imperial legacy, or cultural/literary
tradition. The class is designed as an appropriate capstone for seniors
completing an English major given its theme and its seminar format.
It provides a forum for reflection on your own educational experience
as an interplay between self-help and inheritance. Primary readings
drawn from: Austen, Pride and Prejudice, Mill, ch. “Of
Individuality” from “On Liberty,” Carroll, Alice in Wonderland (with
recent TV production), Dickens, Great Expectations (with recent
film), Woolf, “ A Room of One’s Own,” Naipaul, A House for
Mr. Biswas, Ackroyd, English Music (2 ch.).
Secondary historical/critical/theoretical material (short sel., not read by
all) covered by presentations, drawn from: Samuel Smiles, Edmund
Burke, Matthew Arnold, Barbara Hernstein-Smith, colonial/postcolonial
criticism on Naipaul, Frederick Jameson on post-modernism, possibly
A. S. Byatt. Requirements: on-going seminar discussion
plus 2 presentations (whether leading discussion of a primary text or reporting
on a secondary text); 4-5 pp. paper; 8-10 pp. paper treating more than a single
text. If you choose, these can be related, so that the second paper
revises and expands on the first. The above requirements count 25%,
25%, 50%. No final. I am open to adapt assignments to your purposes
as you conclude your undergraduate work. Research, discussion, oral
presentation, critical writing (in tight focus and more synthesizing formats)
are practical skills you can enhance and lay claim to via this course. Past
senior seminars of mine have proved helpful to students for providing the basis
of letters of recommendation and writing samples, for purposes of
graduate school or other training, or employment.